The milk was conclusive: Infanticide at Edendale and the Political and Moral Economy of Birth and Christianity, 1895 – 1905

Read through legal documents, this paper considers some of the reasons and plausible
motives the women and men convicted of the crimes of infanticide or concealment of birth
may have had for killing their newborn children. Between 1886 and 1905 there were four
cases of infanticide or concealment of birth (of a total of eighteen such cases which came to
trial during this period) brought before the Natal courts that revolved around the
community at the Edendale mission station. The cases of Nomacala Nxumalo (1886), Hester
Cinde (1895), Ntombizonki (1901), Ncikwana (1905) reveal deep‐seated assumptions about
what the state and the communities around these individuals thought about matters such
as the position of women, inter‐racial and inter‐generational relationships, criminal
procedure and the place of medical jurisprudence in the courtroom. The cases of this group
of women ‐ whose geographic location made them susceptible to shared pressures placed
on them by their community ‐ demonstrate the complex interweaving of colonial law,
medical knowledge, customary practices and Christian values.